Obama’s green team: He really meant it

President Obama’s green energy team all said, in essence, that Obama really, really meant it when he vowed to make climate a major focus in Monday’s inaugural speech.

“We need to make sure that we tackle climate change in these next four years and this president is going to do it,” Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, wearing his traditional ten-gallon hat and bolo tie, told the crowd Monday night.

“We are going to lift our game in the interlocking challenges of climate change and energy,” said John Holdren, who is Obama’s top science adviser.

“Energy and climate policy are going to be a top priority,” added Heather Zichal, the top White House energy and climate aide.

1. we have to do this

this country cannot afford superstorm destruction on the scale of Sandy on a regular basis. If Sandy is what we have to look forward to from now on--both during hurricane season and in freak storms that form well after hurricane season is over--then we need to have been rethinking our policy a long, long time ago.

If being energy dependency is not curbed and alternative sources not implemented soon, then we will have to get used to being torn apart by an angry earth on the regular.

4. I'm so happy to live in the green area right now

Yeah, -50F windchills suck during cold snaps like this one, but at least we still have some moisture during the growing season. As I recall, my state (Minnesota) had the best crops of the season last year. I'm interested to see how the exodus from the Great Plains plays out over the next few years; Minnesota could see major population growth as climate refugees stream into the Upper Midwest.

16. that's a bad business move and here's why

climate change isn't waking up one day and growing one thing for ever and ever.

it's that you can't count on growing the cold weather crops the land used to support

but the climate change is not uniform, so you can't count on growing new crops.

it's a disaster and far from being cheerful about it, you should realize that it places millions, many, many millions, already on the brink of starvation, into famine. and if it happens in enough places, your food supply is in jeopardy too.

31. How ironic, indeed!

This is one case where a little exceptionalism might indeed come very much in handy.....but, of course, the GOP is against such, since they feel it hurts their bottom lines; hence, it's also why many deniers claim that initiatives to bring around green jobs and greener energy will inevitably kill the economy and even probably collapse civilization as we know it.....because they are squarely in Big (Fossil) Energy's pockets, too.

13. Don't hold your breath

We need drastic global action immediately that may be very well incompatible economic growth. If the health reform is any indication of how "extreme" we can be on this matter, we like will not put a dent in this issue. The most we can hope for is that governments work to help less of us die.

25. ^^^This^^^

38. He has no idea

I applaud his interest, and his efforts to date. But this president has used the expression "clean coal" which is a joke. The magnitude of change required to accomplish ANYTHING but merely slowing the rate of the problem is well beyond anything his ready, able, or willing to do. The best hope is that he delivers on the idea of making clean energy techologies be something developed and sold from here, instead of India.

30. And this is likely only the beginning, too.

Watch for tower gardens in our future.....there's been a lot of discussion about that in recent years, and might be a hell of a boon for urban residents, particularly if worst-case Plains drought scenarios come close to playing out as some fear they could.

33. I have.

My wife and I went to Detroit for vacation in 2009 (who vacations in Detroit). There were only a few community gardens that we saw at that time, but I believe it only takes a few before people get the 'bug'.

Cleveland (actually Cuyahoga county) extension has some videos on YouTube, and there is a group that took over a school in Kansas City.

It's busting out all over. Once things get going in the right direction, with enough people involved; it will be unstoppable.

This is America's next moon landing. We just have to reduce the influence of the big petrochemical and financial industries and it will happen on its own.

35. I've studied gardening and permaculture

and one of my pet issues is terra preta/biochar:

1. improves soil fertility
2. carbon sink

And what's most amazing, at least in Amazon once initiated, terra preta formation has become "automatic" natural process that does not need human involvement. The science of terra preta is not fully understood, but there is no reason to assume it could not become automatic process also elsewhere.

Terra preta soil improvment can be done both on home scale and on industrial scale. We would be very wise to, IMHO.

40. An industry that I would like to see develop...

Is organic mowing. Using animals (particularly horses) to eat the grass instead of non-renewable fuels.

I haven't mowed my lawn for years (3 acres). I have an electric fence that I can move around to put the horses in areas where I want the grass cut.

Imagine how much we could extend what oil we have in the world if we started encouraging the use of this method instead of mowers. It wouldn't work everywhere, but in addition to the fuel savings; they produce a good quality fertilizer. My chickens typically scratch the manure for bugs and prevent the piles of manure from choking out grass. My lawn looks better each year, and requires much less effort than mowing.

20. I'd like to see what they do, not what they say.

22. Scientists know what can happen

And it scares them when they compare what is happening now to what has happened in the past.

Hothouse Earthby Robert Kunzig
Photograph by Ira Block

Earth has been through this before.

Not the same planetary fever exactly; it was a different world the last time, around 56 million years ago. The Atlantic Ocean had not fully opened, and animals, including perhaps our primate ancestors, could walk from Asia through Europe and across Greenland to North America. They wouldn't have encountered a speck of ice; even before the events we're talking about, Earth was already much warmer than it is today. But as the Paleocene epoch gave way to the Eocene, it was about to get much warmer still—rapidly, radically warmer.

The cause was a massive and geologically sudden release of carbon. Just how much carbon was injected into the atmosphere during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, or PETM, as scientists now call the fever period, is uncertain. But they estimate it was roughly the amount that would be injected today if human beings burned through all the Earth's reserves of coal, oil, and natural gas. The PETM lasted more than 150,000 years, until the excess carbon was reabsorbed. It brought on drought, floods, insect plagues, and a few extinctions. Life on Earth survived—indeed, it prospered—but it was drastically different. Today the evolutionary consequences of that distant carbon spike are all around us; in fact they include us. Now we ourselves are repeating the experiment.

Photograph by Jason Hawkes
The source of the carbon surge 56 million years ago is uncertain, but it was natural. Today’s surge, which may prove much faster, is human made. Oceans and forests absorb atmospheric CO2 but can’t keep up with emissions from stacks like this one (at center) at a coal-fired power plant in England—the country where the industrial revolution began.

The PETM "is a model for what we're staring at—a model for what we're doing by playing with the atmosphere," says Philip Gingerich, a vertebrate paleontologist at the University of Michigan. "It's the idea of triggering something that runs away from you and takes a hundred thousand years to reequilibrate."

34. Just a little. Half or so. eom

36. Obama *had* a "green team" during his first four years. It was the called the

Council on Environmental Quality. Who led the CEQ? Van Jones. Remember what happened to Van Jones?

The point is that I believe the president has always been sincere about addressing climate change. He couldn't get anything through Congress, so he established the CEQ where he directed his federal agencies to address energy-related issues and green policies. I know this because my boss (at HUD) participated in the CEQ.